In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman argued that the problem was not that there was too much “junk” on the tube; rather, it was that television, as a medium, was inherently incapable of hosting serious discussion and debate. According to Postman, television was “at its most trivial” and “most dangerous” when its aspirations were high —that is, when it pretended to be “a carrier of important cultural conversations” (p. 16). On television, any attempt at “serious” speech was destined to fail, for “sustained, complex talk” simply did not “play well on television” (p. 92). As a visual medium, television was better suited to conveying images than arguments, and it implied a different epistemology—and a different “philosophy of rhetoric”—than print. Under the “governance of television,” the “generally coherent, serious and rational” discourse of the print culture inevitably became “shriveled and absurd,” reducing public deliberation to “dangerous nonsense” (pp. 16–17).